Tristan's Gap

by Nancy Rue

  I was almost relieved. It was at least a sign that he was starting to believe it.

  “Ed had the Baltimore police check all the hospitals,” I said.

  “No record of ‘Mrs. Smith,’ huh?” Nick’s voice hardened against the panic I could hear in it. “So if she had an abortion, why didn’t she just come home afterward?”

  “I’ve asked myself that a thousand times today.”

  “Why did she feel like she had to do it in the first place? Why didn’t she just come to us when she found out she was pregnant? What are we, ogres? I’ve never been mean to her, have I?”

  I’d asked myself those same questions. But as Nick ranted on, I had the glimmer of an answer.

  “I don’t think she could stand the way we would look at her when she told us,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It was something Virginia Hatch told me—something about craving approval, having to prove her worth. She tried to be everything we told her to be, Nicky,” I said. “Can you imagine the horrific looks on our faces if we’d found out she’d made a mistake like that? How could she handle it?”

  “I’m getting sick of this being our fault. She made a pretty stupid decision, if you ask me. I know we taught her better than that.”

  I could feel my eyes opening to the revelation that was right in front of me.

  “We never taught her how to make a decision,” I said. “We made all of them for her.”

  “Beautiful.” I could hear Nick thrashing around his hotel room, probably with his hand to the back of his head. “Did I decide she should go sleep with some idiot and end up pregnant?”

  “No. You decided not to let her have anything to do with boys. You decided she was too young for sex education. You decided to keep her so naive she didn’t know what to do the first time a boy flirted with her.”

  “I did all this,” Nick said. His tone turned nasty. “You had nothing to do with it.”

  “I did it too.”

  I stopped. With my next words I could change my life into something I didn’t yet know how to live out. I struggled, because I didn’t know how to make decisions, either.

  But for Tristan, and for Max, I had to.

  “I went along with it because that was the way you said it should be,” I told him. “I didn’t even question it, and I take responsibility for that.”

  “Lord, have mercy,” he said.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Before we hung up, Nick told me he would be home for Thursday, but he’d have to leave again the next day. I had to think a minute before I realized Thursday was Thanksgiving.

  Somehow we got through it. Aunt Pete more or less charbroiled a turkey, and I bought pies at the Food Lion. All day I was able to keep from thinking about Tristan’s setting the table for me every year since I could trust her with the china and taking three times longer than anyone else when we went around the table saying what we were thankful for.

  But I couldn’t keep myself from imagining where she might be this Thanksgiving Day. In a soup kitchen eating instant mashed potatoes and watery gravy? In a lonely room aching for her family—but aching more at what we might say if she crawled back home?

  Those thoughts refused to leave me. They made me pray, hard and bold, for God to bridge that gap. I was doing that, hands in the dishwater, when the doorbell rang.

  “It’s probably Ed Malone,” Nick said. “I invited him over for pie.”

  “Well, he’s gonna get store-bought,” Aunt Pete said with a scowl. “Who knew you were suddenly going to entertain, Nicky?”

  She and Max went into the family room for the traditional Thanksgiving-night watching of Miracle on 34th Street I took coffee and dessert into the library, where Nick and Ed were already in deep discussion. When I walked in, Nick stopped talking and sat back. Ed didn’t miss a beat.

  “I think the next step is to go into the runaway shelters in the Baltimore area,” he said. “I have a list.”

  “What makes you think they’re going to be any more forthcoming with information than the clinic?” Nick said.

  “The staff probably won’t be. But if we could just talk to some kids—”

  “Aren’t the police doing that?”

  Ed grimaced, fork poised over a piece of dry-looking mincemeat. “They may; they may not. Thing is, the kids aren’t going to tell the cops anything. Street kids can have a pretty fierce loyalty to each other.”

  “You said they’d know you were a cop,” I said.

  Ed nodded and chewed.

  Nick was looking at me, which he hadn’t done much in the twenty-four hours he’d been home. “So I suppose you want to go into these places and see if they’ll talk to you.”

  “If that’s what it takes,” I said.

  He blew a disgusted sigh.

  “I’m not going to let her do it alone,” Ed said.

  “You’re not going to ‘let her’?” Nick rolled his eyes. “There was a time when I would have thought you could actually pull that off.” He rested his elbows on his knees, head in his hands, as if it were too heavy to hold up anymore. When he looked back at Ed, he said, “Look, I’m sure you think I’m being a real jerk about this. I just don’t want Serena getting hurt. I guess I could let my entire company go while I look for my daughter. Maybe I should.” I saw him swallow. “I have a factory about to go under down in Dallas …”

  I stared as he explained the possible demise of part of Soltani Casters to Ed. He hadn’t told me how serious it was, how the dilemma was ripping him apart. As I watched him talk, his eyes went glassy.

  “Nothing means more to me than Tristan coming home,” he said. “But I just can’t let this go.”

  “I’ll look out for Serena, Nick,” Ed said.

  Nick kept his eyes on me. “Don’t let her get lost too.”

  Ed and I agreed to go to Baltimore on Saturday. That day, by tradition, was the day the girls and I got out the Christmas decorations, but Aunt Pete said she’d teach Max how to string cranberries, and it would be fine. I winced at the thought and promised myself I was going to make it up to Max as soon as I found her sister.

  Nick left for the airport even before Aunt Pete got up. I made myself hot cocoa in an insulated mug and put on Nick’s hooded down coat and a fuzzy scarf of Tristan’s. Looking like an overdressed penguin, I went down to the boardwalk. If I was going to follow Tristan on her journey, I needed to start where she had. Maybe she’d left some of her thoughts behind.

  It was a magnificent late fall day. The temperature was in the twenties, but the sun in an endlessly blue sky made me wish I’d worn my sunglasses. I shaded my eyes with a gloved hand and climbed the steps to the north end of the boardwalk.

  From the wooden rail where I leaned, the ocean looked freer than it did in the summer. Undotted by swimmers, undisturbed by the squeals of children and the calls of mothers, it sparkled in a way I didn’t notice when it was swarming with people. Only one stark white boat cut through the water, its bow high in the air.

  Trailing my hand along the railing, pushing away the frost, I moved southward. The water-darkened rocks of jetties were still furry with green algae, like shiny cushions on the sea. A cluster of pigeons scavenged the shore for the popcorn and bits of chips available to them in warmer times. Their fruitless pecking stabbed me with thoughts of Tristan.

  A surprising number of human footprints dotted the sand, from the souls brave enough to enjoy both the sun and the cold. As I got closer to the shops on the boardwalk, senior citizens came into view, bundled up like children in snowsuits, taking their morning walks. There was a lone jogger in Gore-Tex with only her eyes showing. I didn’t blame her.

  But even in the presence of other people, the loneliness was overwhelming as I passed the boarded-up shops that promised lemonade and Dippin’ Dots, the Ice Cream of the Future. As the old people passed me with their chipper good-mornings, I could only wonder. Did their children run away from them? Were
they failures as parents? As people?

  I stopped in front of Boardwalk Fries and stared at its closed eyes.

  Did Tristan cry in your back room because she was so scared about her baby? I asked it. Was she standing over your vat of grease when she decided what to do? Did she fold your apron before she left for the last time?

  It told me nothing. I felt as shut down as it was. All the warmth was gone. I was an empty boardwalk. My teeth ached, and my heart ached, and all I could do was pull Tristan’s scarf over my nose and run away.

  Just as she had.

  But I couldn’t go back to the house yet. I couldn’t bring my agony into the scene of Aunt Pete soaking cranberries and Max gleefully pulling out the Christmas CDs. I didn’t know where else to go, and yet I found myself on the beach, sinking into the sand at the base of a dune.

  Even through Nick’s behemoth of a coat I felt something hard on my sitting bones. I found the wherewithal to look to see that I’d landed on a clump of beach grass. It was browned and shriveled, and I grunted at it. “You look like I feel,” I said out loud.

  But in its almost frozen state it seemed to have a better hold on the sand than it did in the summer, especially now that people were no longer tromping thoughtlessly across it in their vacation bliss. Maybe in its wintry state, less of the dune would wash away.

  I wished I could say the same for myself. I felt as if I were sliding right into the sea.

  “No!” I said. “I can’t let that happen. God, please, help me hang on!”

  I huddled there, rubbing my gloved hands on the tops of the clumps, and I prayed—begged—pleaded—until I stopped eroding.

  I’m in a winter place in my life, I thought. I looked down at the beach grass and up at the endless, almighty sky and saw what could only be seen in such a place. The one true thing that would hold me together.

  Come after me, said the whisper.

  By three in the afternoon, I deemed our long day fruitless. As Ed and I had moved from one shelter to another, I felt like the pigeons on the cold beach. I could hear their mournful cries in my head.

  Just as we expected, none of the staff at any of the places that protected runaways from the streets would tell us if Tristan had been there. The kids themselves were hidden somewhere beyond the for-tressed entranceways where we were stopped. Several staffers said they had come on board long after August 4, and kids were allowed to stay for only seventy-two hours.

  “Mostly we try to get them back home,” one enormous man with chest hair billowing from his collar told us. I couldn’t imagine Tristan arguing with him. If she’d been there, surely she would have slipped away immediately.

  Weary at three o’clock, we went into a diner for lunch. I ignored the duct-taped scar on the booth I slipped into and asked for a grilled cheese sandwich.

  “That’s probably going to taste like rubber,” Ed said when the waitress had gone away to yell our order into the kitchen.

  “I don’t think I can eat anyway,” I said. The smells in the shelters had been enough to turn me off food for the rest of my life.

  Ed spread out our now dog-eared list. One corner soaked up a grease smear from the table.

  “We’ve hit Teen Challenge, Teen Haven, that Salvation Army place, Foundation 2.” He looked up at me, his eyes and mouth drooping at the corners. “That’s it for the city of Baltimore, Serena. We could try some of the suburbs. She might have caught a ride out to one of those.”

  I nodded toward the paper. “What about the one you didn’t mark off?”

  “The Sanctuary.” Ed shook his head. “I asked that one guy about it. He said it’s closed down. Some kids still hang out in the empty building, but there aren’t any services for them. He’s surprised the cops haven’t run them out of there.”

  I took the list from him and ran my finger across the words. The Sanctuary.

  My safe place, my God space.

  Could love be my sanctuary?

  “I want to go there,” I said.

  Ed winced. “These are going to be kids on the streets, Serena,” he said. “We’re talking drug addicts, junior con artists—”

  “Prostitutes,” I finished for him.

  The waitress unceremoniously dropped a plate on the table in front of me. I pushed it away. “If Tristan heard that name—the Sanctuary—I know she would have been drawn to it. And if there are just kids—no adults—who’s to stop them from talking to us?”

  “If adults can spot a cop—”

  “Then I’ll go in alone,” I said.

  “I can’t let you do that.” He closed his eyes for a second. “I sound like Nick, don’t I?”

  “You made him a promise. I get that,” I said. I was already slinging my purse over my shoulder. “If you hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have gotten this far. Can’t you put on some kind of disguise or something?”

  Ed laughed, a deep, soft sound I’d heard only once or twice. It kept me from clawing my fingers at the tabletop.

  “I might be able to pull off a disguise,” he said, “but we already know you have no future in undercover work.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, so I’ll take them some food. They’ve got to be hungry, right?”

  A slow smile spread across Ed’s face until it reached his eyes. “That might do it, only—” He cocked an eyebrow at the grease-soaked sandwich going cold on my plate. “Let’s not offer them grilled cheese.”

  We bought a dozen cheeseburgers at McDonald’s before we ventured into a section of town ten blocks from the WCC. I clung to the bag for warmth as Ed pulled the Jeep up next to a chain-link fence topped by sagging barbed wire. Beyond it was a cement basketball court with netless rusty hoops and a cinder-block building minus any glass in its windows.

  It looked less like a sanctuary than anything I could conjure up, and yet there was a cracked, weather-beaten sign over the door proclaiming it to be just that in too-blue letters. The only attempt at anything resembling refuge were two curly wrought-iron railings, each of which now hung by a single bolt.

  “Seriously, Serena,” Ed said, “I don’t see any signs of life.”

  But even as he spoke, a head covered in a black wool cap down to its eyelids popped out of a window and popped back in. I was sure I heard Ed swear under his breath.

  “These hamburgers are getting cold,” I said.

  Ed sighed and opened the Jeep door.

  It was surreal, walking across the hard dirt up to that building. I felt like I had no body at all until Ed pushed the door open, and the putrid odor of stale smoke and soured humanity assaulted me. I had to force myself not to gag.

  “Anybody home?” Ed called out.

  “No!” someone yelled back.

  Whoever it was told the truth. This couldn’t be home for any living being.

  Ed motioned for me to wait while he went inside. I stood shivering, clutching my meager bag of fast food, and listened to the murmur of voices. I strained to hear Tristan’s, but they all sounded alike. Low and lifeless.

  Ed finally reappeared and nodded me in. “Prepare yourself,” he whispered.

  There was no way I could have. The stench was worse on the other side of the door, and the air it arose from was thick with what I assumed was cigarette smoke until I saw flames licking the rim of a fifty-gallon drum.

  Piles of what appeared to be rags littered the gaping hole of a room. Next to each was a battered paperback book or a piece of candle or a shopping bag that had seen better days. The people who, I decided, owned them were standing around the container of fire, looking at us out of faces as empty as the room.

  The boy in the ski cap narrowed Asian American eyes in our direction. Next to him, a girl with hair that might have been red once, when it was washed, lifted her lip.

  Ed put both hands up. “I’m telling you, we’re not with the Baltimore PD. We’re not with social services. We just want to give you some food.”

  Feeling as if I had “I Am Someone’s Mother” printed on my forehead, I held up
the bag.

  “Mickey D’s,” said a bony African American kid who couldn’t have been more than twelve.

  He started for me. The bleached-blond African American girl next to him grabbed for his arm, but she couldn’t compete with the smell of cheeseburgers that barely permeated the odors they were living in.

  Neither of us said a word as we passed out the burgers and watched the kids retreat to the fire and devour them. They all had the same empty look in their eyes, the same hardness around their mouths that turned them to road-weary adults. But the slightness of their shoulders, the unformed tenderness of their jaws made me painfully aware that none of them was a day over sixteen.

  I counted six. Everyone but the redhead inhaled two hamburgers. She put her second one under a pile of rags, while the boy with the baby face watched and all but drooled.

  “That better be there when I come back for it,” she said to him. Her tone was harsh, but the voice itself could have belonged to any friend of Tristan’s. It was a voice that should have been giggling in the locker room or whispering on the school bus.

  “Anybody still hungry?” Ed said.

  The young kid did some kind of homeboy swagger. “I could use an order of fries,” he said.

  The blonde poked him, but he waved his hand at Ed, the lines on his palm embedded with dirt.

  “We’ll get you fries, pizza, whatever you want,” Ed said, “if you’ll just answer a couple of questions.”

  Suspicion came down over most pairs of eyes like window shades. The redhead narrowed hers into hyphens and propped herself against the wall.

  “I’m not sayin’ nothing,” the Asian American boy said.

  The blonde looked at me. “I know she ain’t no cop.”

  “Man, we’re not even from around here,” Ed said. “We don’t care that you got a squat that hasn’t been busted yet.”

  They all looked at the Asian American kid. He didn’t move.

  “You want to see my driver’s license?” Ed said to him.

  “Yeah. Bring it on.”